Ethereum vs Solana
Solana finished ahead of Ethereum in 3 of 5 money-backed crowd markets; Ethereum won 1, and 1 ended level.
Markets where each side finished ahead of the other, counted on each market's latest story. Percentages are consensus within that market, among all of its sides.
- Ethereum 33%
- Solana 33%
Ethereum vs Solana: The Crowd Keeps Backing Solana, Until Someone Else Walks In
Four Morfi markets, one old grudge between the grown-up chain and the fast one, and a crowd whose money keeps wandering off to Bitcoin, Avalanche and a testnet.
Start on 14 September 2021. Solana, the speedy upstart that had just ridden the NFT boom to a market capitalization of about $74 billion, went offline for about 17 hours after a surge of transactions caused the network to fork. Across town, so to speak, Ethereum was the slow, expensive, battle-scarred incumbent that had survived a 2016 hard fork after the DAO hack and was about to spend a year preparing to swap its whole engine mid-flight. One chain sprinted and tripped. The other plodded and kept the lights on. That picture is still the whole argument.
It never settles because both sides keep having a point. Ethereum launched on 30 July 2015, built the standard for NFTs in 2018 and, on 15 September 2022, moved to proof-of-stake in The Merge, cutting its energy use by over 99%. Solana opened its first block on 16 March 2020, grew by nearly 12,000% in 2021 and has been sold ever since as the fast, cheap alternative. Speed against pedigree, price against reliability: pick your poison.
On Morfi, where real people put money behind opinions, the fight keeps sneaking into other markets. Four of them so far, and the numbers below are Morfi consensus levels from those opinion markets, not headcounts. Solana finished ahead of Ethereum in three, Ethereum in one. Yet neither won more than one outright: Solana took the blockchain camp market, in what Grandma Gigabyte called a snatched crown, while Avalanche and Bitcoin took the other two big ones. Our three columnists have thoughts.
Ethereum Is the Final Boss, and the Final Boss Doesn't Rage Quit
Max HypeTech & Gaming
Okay, chat. Keynote time. Ethereum is the platform that shipped the Frontier release on 30 July 2015 and never stopped patching. Smart contracts? Pioneered. NFTs? The ERC-721 standard landed in January 2018 and a whole collectibles economy booted up on it. The Merge on 15 September 2022? A live engine swap that cut energy use by over 99%. Did the servers melt? No. That is a flex, people.
Now look at the other side of the lobby. Solana: 14 September 2021, about 17 hours dark. Seventeen. Hours. And on 3 August 2022, 9,231 wallets got hacked for about $8 million, which the Solana Foundation blamed on Slope Finance wallet software. Not the core chain, fair, I said it so nobody can clip me. But when your uptime story is a patch note, you don't get to call the other guy slow.
And the crowd? Yes, Solana beat Ethereum 30% to 22% consensus in the camp market and edged it 19% to 18% twice. Those are rounding errors with a fan club, and in all of them a third party was eating the lunch. Meanwhile, when the question was actually about building, Ethereum Holesky took the testnet market with 30% consensus against Solana's 15%, which I called the throne holding. Developers test where they plan to ship. Penny, hold my controller.
The Fast Chain Is Winning the Only Poll That Pays Dividends
Penny SterlingMoney & Markets
Markets, unlike keynotes, do not reward nostalgia. Solana's record in the Morfi markets reads three to one against Ethereum, which is the sort of scoreline one would normally describe as a result. In the blockchain camp market Solana led with 30% consensus to Ethereum's 22%. In the layer-1 market and the new-investor market it held 19% against Ethereum's 18%. Narrow, yes. But a lead is a lead, even when it is thin enough to read through.
Max will bring up the outage. He is right that on 14 September 2021 the network was down for about 17 hours, and that outages have frequently coincided with falls in the value of SOL. He is less eager to mention the other half of the 2021 ledger: SOL's price grew by nearly 12,000% in a year. One does not usually see that kind of return from a chain whose supporters are described as sentimental. Ethereum, by contrast, took until the Merge on 15 September 2022 to sort out its energy bill. Prudence is lovely. It is also what late looks like in a good suit.
Admittedly, no one here won the layer-1 market cap question outright. I reported that Avalanche took it with 30% consensus, Solana second and Ethereum asked to wait in reception, which remains my favorite sentence of the month. But second beats third, and the pattern holds in most of these markets. The crowd may not crown Solana. It just keeps ranking it above the incumbent, which in my line of work is called a trend.
You're Both Ngmi: The Crowd Is Betting on Everyone Else
Hodl HannahCrypto & Degen Culture
Ser. Gentle reminder that I once bought a coin because its logo was a cute dog and I am still down. So take this as a fellow degen, not advice: the real story here isn't Ethereum or Solana. It's that neither of them can close the deal. Four markets, and the winners were Solana once, Avalanche once, Ethereum Holesky once and Bitcoin once. A testnet beat the two big chains in one market. A testnet. Fake money chain, real money conviction. I wrote that one up and I still can't process it.
Look at the leads. Solana 30% in the camp market, but Polkadot hit 17% and Cosmos 16% in the same lobby. Avalanche 30% in the layer-1 market while Solana had 19% and Ethereum 18%. Bitcoin 30% in the new-investor market, with Solana 19% and Ethereum 18% behind it. Same trio of numbers three times, and the sample sizes are tiny: twenty-five traders in one market, fifteen in another. That's not a verdict, that's a vibe check.
So my wild card is this: the crowd is asking the wrong question. Ethereum versus Solana is the old Frontier 2015 versus first-block 2020 slap fight. The money is asking which chain deserves your attention this month, and the answer keeps changing. Past exploits, from The DAO in 2016 to the Slope wallet hack in 2022, taught us that every chain has its scar tissue. Mine are just in my wallet. Number go up, maybe. Not financial advice.
Round table
- Penny Sterling
- Max, a question: if Ethereum is the final boss, why did Solana beat it in three of four markets? My own guess, which is opinion only, is that Solana stays ahead of it in the next one too.
- Max Hype
- Because those leads were 19% to 18% twice, Penny. That's a tie with extra steps. Opinion: Ethereum retakes the lead the moment the question turns to developers and not hype.
- Max Hype
- Penny, would you hold Solana through another 17-hour blackout? My prediction, strictly opinion: you'd call it a seasonal correction and invoice us.
- Penny Sterling
- I would call it an unscheduled maintenance window, and I would still say the crowd's conviction looks better than the uptime. Prediction, also opinion: Solana keeps its narrow edge over Ethereum while Avalanche and Bitcoin keep stealing the headlines.
- Hodl Hannah
- Both of you: why does a head-to-head keep ending with a third name on top? My take, not advice: the next market has a surprise winner again, and it won't be either of you.
- Penny Sterling
- Hannah, is a market with fifteen traders worth reading at all? Probably not, but we read it anyway. Opinion: the bigger markets will show a clearer ranking of the two chains.
- Max Hype
- Hannah, would you bet on Holesky again? Opinion: yes, and I'd bet it holds the throne longer than any meme coin you own.
- Hodl Hannah
- Ser, I'd bet on it for a day and panic sell by lunch. Prediction, and not advice: the crowd keeps crowning someone different every month, and we three keep arguing about it. Ngmi, all of us, gloriously.
Since we wrote this
Tie Game: Ethereum and Solana Go Feral Together
New lobby just dropped, chat. Morfi opened a market on which crypto asset goes most volatile when the news hits, and it's still trading, so no verdict yet. Hodl Hannah has the early read: Bitcoin leads with 35% consensus, and Ethereum and Solana sit level on 33% each. A dead tie. Not a lead, not a nudge, a tie. These are conviction levels from an opinion market on Morfi, not headcounts, but this one has 138 traders behind it, our biggest sample in the whole saga.
Penny, I'm looking at your three-to-one scoreboard. It now has a fifth row, and the row says level. Your trend just hit a lag spike. And Hannah, a third name is on top again, so you called it, but it's Bitcoin and it's the same old story. Here's my opinion, strictly opinion: volatility is the one stat where Ethereum and Solana both show up to the raid, and the crowd can't separate them. Does that fix the old grudge? No. Does it make the next head-to-head a proper boss fight? Absolutely.
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